473
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
473 points (100.0% liked)
PC Gaming
13939 readers
410 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The Switch was technically last-gen when it was new. The Xbox One and PS4 came out in 2013-2014. The Switch came out in like 2016 and was weaker than them, closer in performance to 360/PS3. The Switch was, in fact, a professionally modded Nvidia Shield 2014 model. The 2014 iPhones were better equipped, and the 2016-2017 Android flagships were as well (Android flagships lagged behind iPhone by a few years back then, now it's more like one year or less). So by the time the Switch was a few years old, your phone was more powerful in most cases.
Anything that can run on a Switch 1 can easily run on virtually every phone released in the last 5-7 years. And they're the same CPU architecture (ARM64, with only a couple Android phones not using that, namely the Asus... I forget the model number, but they were not popular).
That's why having a Mac is kind of like a cheat code to emulating Switch. The Switch emulator is doing a lot less work since it's talking to the same kind of processor. Of course, PC guys still have the advantage because a dedicated GPU more than makes up for the ARM64 advantage M-series Macs have! So your CPU is working harder but you have GPU to spare. We have like no GPU (it's integrated).
Isn't every processor today outside of niche embedded use cases and the dream that is RISC-V either x86-64 or ARM64? By that logic, everything is fair to emulate, because pretty much everything shares the same processor architecture.
I mean laptops, desktops, non-handleld consoles and servers broadly use x86-64, phones and some specialised low-powered laptops and servers, and handheld consoles use ARM64.
The only special case was pre-ARM MACS this century, they were on PowerPC IIRC.
And the PS3 Cell. Also PowerPC IIRC.
Wasnt' the 360 PPC too?